I’m Tukayote, An Unkillable Love
Recovery Through Love. No Anesthesia. No Bullshit. 🥰
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The last few weeks have been some of the best of my life and some of the hardest. New partnerships, 17 mile walks, personal records, full heart. Also: a shame tornado, then a shame hurricane, then a second wave that took everything out. On my 199th day without smoking I had a lit cigarette in my hand. My tribe showed up anyway. They didn’t wait for me to ask. That’s the whole point. Storms come and go. We don’t have to weather them alone.
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Do something every day that scares you. I mean it. Vulnerability isn’t weakness — it’s the whole damn engine. It’s where love, intimacy, shame-death, and real change live. Brené Brown nailed it over and over, so I’m sharing my favorites here alongside what I know to be true from my own life: when you can open your heart, get scared, and tell the hardest truth to another human being in complete safety, it changes you forever. And it tells you exactly who’s safe to keep around.
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Five months ago I wrote an affirmation about healing my inner child. Today I drafted a message to someone who has been causing me pain for over a year, then deleted it without sending. That’s growth. That’s the whole point. I can’t control them, their path, or their desire to pull me back in. The only thing I have ever had power over is myself. I made a list. It keeps growing. At the root of it is one word: me.
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Every morning I wake up, I get a blank canvas. A day that hasn’t been ruined yet. Full of potential. I can chase something, learn something, connect with someone, love myself a little better. Or I can waste it. Either way, I can’t go back. So today feels like a good day to go after it.
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For most of my life my answer to “how often do you practice self-love” was zero. I spent decades telling myself I was broken, unworthy, unlovable. Overweight, bipolar, estranged from my daughters, two failed marriages, nothing to show for my 30s. Then I tried something uncomfortable: I looked in the mirror and said “I love you, Tukayote.” And I listened to every awful thing my brain fired back. Then I wrote it all down. Then I found gratitude in every single one of them. That’s where it started.
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Three weeks without a cigarette. Four days without nicotine. That alone feels unreal. What’s even clearer now is why I smoked. It was never random. It was an escape from discomfort. I got hurt, and I relapsed. Over and over. Cigarettes became how I painted over boredom, stress, anxiety, even happiness. One hour at a time. Now I can finally see the pattern without being inside it. That changes everything. After twenty years, digging through those layers is brutal, but it’s honest work. I’ve avoided 321 cigarettes in 16 days. Thousands of cravings. Thousands of conscious no’s. This isn’t willpower.…
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